抄録
Tropical dry forests are among the world's most imperiled biomes, and most long-lived and large-bodied animals that inhabit tropical dry forests persist in small, fragmented populations. Long-term monitoring is necessary for understanding the extent to which such populations can cope with changing environmental conditions and recover after the elimination of human disturbances. We investigated how climatic fluctuations and landscape structural dynamics have affected the population dynamics of white-faced capuchins (Cebus capucinus) in a Costa Rican tropical dry forest over a 42-year period after the elimination of most detrimental human disturbances. The population's rapid initial growth and later stabilization suggests that it was below the habitat's carrying capacity at the time of the conservation area's establishment. Most of the population growth in recent decades has occurred in a sub-region that has experienced greater gains in forest cover with medium- to high-degree of evergreenness, which is an important resource for primates during the severe dry season. The availability evergreen habitats varied with the strength of the previous wet season, which in turn was strongly coupled with global climatic and oceanic cycles. Following extreme drought periods, population growth slowed, mean group size decreased, and reproductive rate declined. The sensitivity of this ecosystem to global climatic phenomena suggests that some animals will be negatively affected if drought years become increasingly common as the global climate warms.
